[conspire] How do I determine what I need to keep from my internal hard drive and what is the recommend way to move things to an external hard drive

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Margaret Wendall (mwendall at gmail.com):

> Darlene, when I back my hard drives up, I always include the drivers for
> hardware that I've had to download for one reason or another. It saves a lot
> of time and hair in an emergency. Margaret Wendall

This is a subset/example of the more general point that you should
always have reference master copies of all local modifications.
For locally built/installed software, I keep reference copies in
/usr/local/src.